PURE Storage – Gigaomhttps://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 25 Sep 2017 15:05:19 +0000en-UShourly1Pure Storage obtains more than 100 patents from IBMhttps://gigaom.com/2014/06/19/pure-storage-licenses-more-than-100-patents-from-ibm/
https://gigaom.com/2014/06/19/pure-storage-licenses-more-than-100-patents-from-ibm/#commentsThu, 19 Jun 2014 19:45:25 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=851834Pure Storage, an upstart flash-storage company that is in the midst of a nasty intellectual property spat with rival EMC, announced on Thursday that it has acquired more than 100 patents from IBM.

Joe FitzGerald, the VP of Legal for Pure Storage, said in a statement that the deal significantly increase the number patents the company holds and that its customers will benefit from its “more robust and strategic” portfolio. The company’s CEO also said it would take “the moral high ground” in its use of the new IP.

The parties did not disclose financial terms, but did say the deal involves a cross-licensing arrangement. It’s also not immediately clear what the patent purchase will mean for Pure Storage on a tactical level. The company didn’t say, for instance, whether it will assert the patents against EMC or if the deal involves IBM helping it with technological issues.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/06/19/pure-storage-licenses-more-than-100-patents-from-ibm/feed/2Crazy dough? Pure Storage rakes in $225M in new funding, for reported $3B+ valuationhttps://gigaom.com/2014/04/23/crazy-dough-pure-storage-rakes-in-225m-in-new-funding-for-reported-3b-valuation/
https://gigaom.com/2014/04/23/crazy-dough-pure-storage-rakes-in-225m-in-new-funding-for-reported-3b-valuation/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 09:46:50 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=836324Flash storage maker Pure Storage just netted $225 million in new funding, bringing its total cash trove to a whopping $470 million, with a claimed valuation of more than $3 billion. This comes just nine months after Pure Storage raised $150 million in Series E funding.

The money will fuel the company’s undeniably expensive enterprise push and maintain what it calls a two-year head start in technology. It may have gotten the jump on older, established rivals, but they’re all in this game now and that means the cost of customer acquisition will rise. Last fall, storage market leader EMC(s emc) launched its own flash storage push, using technology acquired with XtremIO.

While Pure Storage, Nimbus Data and other rivals tout the use of fast Flash for nearly every need, there is not 100 percent agreement that this is really necessary. An array of startups and legacy companies, including EMC, also push hybrid arrays that pair traditional spinning disk with flash as needed. Spinning disks are not as fast as flash, but they’re considerably cheaper. For more context on this, check out last year’s Structure talk with Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen (pictured above) and DataGravity CEO Paula Long and our Structure podcast with Long.

Pure Storage’s new cash, which comes in part from new investor Wellington Management Company as well as previous backers T.Rowe Price Associates and Tiger Global, may also come in handy to fund a multi-front legal spat with EMC, which sued some former employees who joined Pure. And given this huge cash infusion, Pure will have to get more specific about its long-stated IPO plans. Given all this investment, you’ve got to wonder how much of a stake the founders still have in the company.

The gist of the suit, filed Monday at the U.S. District Court in Boston, is that Chadwick Johnson took with him “a spreadsheet with 93,000 entries of names, purchase histories, deal values, and other highly specific, confidential, and critical information about EMC customers,” according to the report, which said this is the latest in a series of lawsuits lodged against employees who left for Pure Storage, which just landed a whopping $150 million in VC funding.

EMC is facing an array of smaller rivals pushing all-flash storage or hybrid arrays that combine flash and hard disk storage as it negotiates its own transition, integrating Flash in some of its products. It has also bought expertise in flash with its acquisition of ExtremeIOXtremIO for $430 million last year.

Update: In an emailed statement, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen said: “We have a strong policy against use of any third party confidential information that we take seriously, and we actively investigate any allegations around its misuse. Bottom line, we are building a world-class organization that is defined by integrity and transparency.”

Note: this story was updated at 3:33 p.m. PDT with a statement from Pure Storage.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/10/22/emc-sues-former-salesman-who-joined-rival-pure-storage/feed/3And … the new VC numbers are in. Here are the winners and losershttps://gigaom.com/2013/10/18/and-the-new-vc-numbers-are-in-here-are-the-winners-and-losers/
https://gigaom.com/2013/10/18/and-the-new-vc-numbers-are-in-here-are-the-winners-and-losers/#commentsFri, 18 Oct 2013 14:04:15 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=706138For the third quarter, total venture capital spending in the U.S. rose 12 percent to $7.8 billion compared to $7 billion for the previous quarter. Total number of deals rose five percent to 1,005 from 956 over the previous quarter, according to the latest MoneyTree tally from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

Software, admittedly a very broad category, was hot, reaping more than $3 billion (the first time in 12 years it’s hit that mark) in 420 deals, a 23 percent increase from 342 deals the previous quarter. The lion’s share of the very biggest deals were in software.

If any category looks to be struggling — at least comparatively speaking, anyway — it’s the broad life sciences arena, which saw funding drop 25 percent, although the number of deals rose 3 percent. Clean tech — a category including alternative energy, recycling and pollution reduction — also struggled, with total deal money falling 20 percent over the last quarter to $297 million. The total number of clean energy deals was down 7 percent, to 40. This is the seventh consecutive quarter of declines for this category.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA base their report on Thomson Reuters data.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/10/18/and-the-new-vc-numbers-are-in-here-are-the-winners-and-losers/feed/2Flash gold rush continues as Western Digital buys Virident for $685Mhttps://gigaom.com/2013/09/09/flash-gold-rush-continues-as-western-digital-buys-virident-for-625m/
Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:19:21 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=687995Flash storage may not universally replace spinning disk, but it is a big, big business and getting bigger all the time — which is why Western Digital(s wdc) is buying Virident a server-side flash player, for $685 million in cash.

This acquisition comes three months after Western Digital, a hard drive maker, purchased Stec, a maker of enterprise-class flash storage, for $340 million. Milpitas, Calif.-based Virident, like Stec before it, will be part of HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital.

“We have established a competitive position in the enterprise SSD space and with our recently announced acquisitions we are increasing our commitment to become an even more significant player in this high growth segment,” Steve Milligan, president and CEO of Western Digital said in a statement.

Pure-play flash storage players include Skyera and Pure Storage both of which maintain that all-flash storage is becoming price competitive with spinning disk way to go. Violin Memory, another flash pioneer, filed its IPO last week. No doubt the flash pool is getting crowded — server-side pioneer Fusion.io missed on its revenue expectations last month, but no one expects the M&A activity in this area to subside.

All flash? Not yet

The pure flash story may sound good. Flash, after all is faster than spinning disk and much faster than tape. But many customers say a hybrid approach — using spinning or hard disks where appropriate but adding flash in critical spots is the most cost-effective solution.

For all this talk of all-flash-all-time no one is seriously writing off even tape for archival storage. The real deal, as Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Mark Peters told me a while back is most customers will use flash “judiciously” in their enterprise, reserving it for the jobs needing the absolutely fastest response where it can act as a “turbo” to an existing storage system.

]]>EMC gets flashier with latest hybrid storage arrayhttps://gigaom.com/2013/09/04/emc-gets-flashier-with-latest-hybrid-storage-array/
https://gigaom.com/2013/09/04/emc-gets-flashier-with-latest-hybrid-storage-array/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2013 12:31:54 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=686562Last week was VMware’s time to shine. Now parent company EMC(s emc) is strutting its stuff — in Milan — unveiling an updated VNX hybrid storage array that it claims is now built with fast flash storage in mind first and foremost, but also incorporates disk storage as needed.

“As the cost of flash media falls and more enterprises turn to it for faster access to at least some of their data, hybrid arrays of both SSDs (solid-state disks) and HDDs (hard disk drives) are becoming an enterprise storage mainstay. Getting the full benefit of flash in those platforms requires more than just installing SSDs in place of spinning disks, so EMC and others are upping their game to increase speed across the board.”

Besides contending with traditional rivals like NetApp(s ntap), which has a flash story of its own, EMC faces increasing competition from smaller storage upstarts including all-flash-all-the-time players like Skyera and Pure Storageand Nimble Storage — all of whom say all-flash storage is becoming price competitive with spinning disk. Frankly, most customers disagree, but many do see a place for flash storage for certain workloads. EMC obviously saw the challenge, and dropped big dough to buy ExtremeIO last year and ScaleIO earlier this summer. Update: Other upstart hybrid players include Nimble Storage.

Also in Milan, EMC said its ViPR storage virtualization product will be available within a month and demonstrated Project Nile on-premise storage, based on that technology. This offering should enable third-party service providers to offer their customers flexible and scalable storage services “similar to those offered by the web-scale Public Cloud providers, but with the control security and reliability of a Private Cloud,” according to EMC.

EMC, like VMware(s vmw) and other legacy IT providers, is ramping up its response to the aforementioned public cloud providers (a.k.a. Amazon(s amzn) Web Services). That’s why VMware built vCloud Hybrid Services, which despite its name is a public cloud, and why EMC is offering storage-as-a-service. Still, given these companies’ enterprise legacy — and the pricing and licensing models that implies — customers must be convinced that their products are price-competitive with what they can rent from Amazon.

This story was updated at 11:27 a.m. PDT September 4 to reflect that Nimble Storage is a hybrid, not a pure-flash, storage company.

On Thursday, the company announced a whopping $150 million in Series E funding — what it calls the largest private funding round in the history of enterprise storage. It will use the cash to fuel expansion in Europe and Asia and to boost R&D efforts. The new money brings total funding to an impressive $245 million for the company, which is headed for an IPO. Violin Memory, another flash storage player, quietly filed for an IPO of its own last week.

In a statement, CEO Scott Dietzen (pictured above) said the funding will help the company “lead the transition from mechanical disk to flash memory in the data center.”

Pure also brought industry veteran Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain (now part of storage leader EMC(s emc)) aboard as a director. Slootman, along with VMware(s vmw) co-founders Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum was an angel investor.

The Mountain View, Calif. company netted $40 million in a Series D round a year ago. Pure Storage, along with a half-dozen rivals, evangelizes the use of fast solid-state storage nearly everywhere. Some rivals advocate a tiered storage approach that mixes spinning disks with flash, arguing that the hybrid approach is more cost-effective for most businesses.

Here’s betting that Pure Storage will use its new funding to drive down prices to make all-flash-all-the-time a more attractive option for those businesses.

]]>Can we write off disk if tape isn’t even dead?https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/can-we-write-off-disk-if-tape-isnt-even-dead/
https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/can-we-write-off-disk-if-tape-isnt-even-dead/#commentsThu, 20 Jun 2013 22:05:29 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=659868The flash storage industry has been writing off disk for years, but they might be getting ahead of themselves. According to DataGravity Co-founder and CEO Paula Long (who previously co-founded EqualLogic) during a Thursday afternoon Structure panel, tape isn’t even dead yet and disk is far from the grave.

Essentially, Long explained, flash is good for certain things but “it’s not the panacea for all workloads.” If you’re doing virtual desktops or server virtualization, great. If you’re doing big data or some sort of sequential workloads, though, disk will probably work just fine.

“The same number of people who need a million (IOPS) are the same people who need 0 to 60 in 4 seconds on their car,” she said. Even so, she noted, there are ways to configure a hybrid hard disk plus flash array that could compete with pure flash in terms of performance.

Actually, Long noted, “I don’t (tape is) dead.” Although, she acknowledged, “But I don’t know if I did a startup that’s where I’d be going.”

Long’s co-panelist, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen, take a different view. His company sells all-flash storage arrays that he says can outdo high-performance disk on every metric — cost, performance, effiency, you name it — and that customers get hooked once they use flash. People like hybrid arrays because they’re like booking a tugboat ride and getting a speedboat, he analogized, but once they experience the speedboat they don’t want to go back.

A transcription of the video follows on the next page
]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/can-we-write-off-disk-if-tape-isnt-even-dead/feed/1Pure Storage nets new cash from In-Q-Tel to push its “flash for all” efforthttps://gigaom.com/2013/05/29/pure-storage-nets-new-cash-from-in-q-tel-to-fund-flash-for-all/
Wed, 29 May 2013 11:00:36 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=649929Flash storage dynamo Pure Storage has snagged new funding — the amount is undisclosed — from In-Q-Tel, the VC affiliate of the CIA and other security agencies. The fresh cash comes atop a $40 million D round closed last August, which brought the total tally at the time to a robust $95 million.

Matt Kixmoeller, VP of products for Pure Storage.

In-Q-Tel backing should make it easier to get traction in defense and security-related venues which view In-Q-Tel backing as a sort of seal of approval, said Pure Storage co-founder and CEO Scott Dietzen. “The immediate value [of the In-Q-Tel relationship] is in the procurement and sourcing agreements with these agencies,” he added.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also unveiled the third major release of its core storage product that adds data-at-rest, 256-bit AES encryption that ensures that customer data is encrypted all the time — even if an array has to be taken out of service for transport or repair,

“We are software guys who focus on value-add deduplication, and encryption — we bake them right in and don’t even let them be turned off,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of product marketing and management. “Our hardware-oriented competitors add these things after the fact and then see massive performance degradation as a result.”

Pure’s flash-for-all motto is ambitious — solid-state flash memory is seen as much pricier than traditional disk drives and tape. But Pure executives said they’re serious about bringing the cost of flash storage down at least to spinning disk levels.

“If you take traditional tier 1 drives, you generally pay $3 to $5 per gig, but as you provision it and do things to make it useful, the end price is more like $5 to $10 per gig. We can sell flash at about $5 per useable gig,” Dietzen said.

Dan Iacano, IDC’s research director of storage systems, said Pure’s pitch has some merit.”You can probably still get tier 1 disks for a little it lower, but if you look at the all-in baked in price [of the disk and all the software that makes it truly useful] Pure Storage close,” he noted.

Pure Storage definitely generates buzz but it also faces some talented competitors ranging from Violin Memory and Whiptail to Texas Memory, which IBM bought last year to boost its stake in the super-heated flash memory market. The race to flash-enable the world is going to be fun to watch.

]]>Nimble Storage gets $40M as IPO approacheshttps://gigaom.com/2012/09/10/nimble-storage-gets-40m-as-ipo-approaches/
https://gigaom.com/2012/09/10/nimble-storage-gets-40m-as-ipo-approaches/#commentsMon, 10 Sep 2012 10:00:39 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=560892Updated: Flash-based storage provider Nimble Storage has closed a $40.7 million mezzanine round months ahead of schedule, as investors are lining up to get a piece of the next big storage initial public offering. Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners led the round, which brings Nimble’s total funding to $98 million and puts its valuation in the range of other recent storage-industry success stories Data Domain (s emc) and 3PAR (s hpq), according to CEO Suresh Vasudevan.

Update: Nimble has been remarkably successful since it began shipping its hybrid flash-plus-hard-drive gear two years ago. The company, which focuses on small and mid-size enterprises, has amassed more than 1,100 deployments across more than 600 customers and hopes to be bringing in quarterly revenue between $25 million and $35 million relatively soon, Vasudevan said during a recent interview. It comes up against large vendors such as NetApp (s ntap), Dell (s dell) and EMC (s emc) about 85 percent of the time, he added, and it typically wins those deals.

Flash storage is a white-hot market right now because of the significant performance and efficiency improvements it provides over hard drives — important considerations in a world where virtualization reigns supreme — and because the gap in price between the two is closing fast. In the past several months, EMC paid $430 million for all-flash startup XtremIO, while Violin Memory ($80 million) and Pure Storage ($40 million) have both brought in hefty investments. Nutanix and Tintri, both of which, like Nimble, fuse flash and hard drives and target mid-market businesses, recently raised $33 million and $25 million, respectively.

Putting both flash drives and hard disks in the same array means customers can save money on bulk storage while still getting the flash performance boost where it’s needed. As I explained when covering Nimble’s previous funding round in July 2011, customers seem to love the flexibility of its appliances. They can change the ratio of flash to hard to disk capacity to suit their needs, and some customers even use a single Nimble appliance for both primary storage and backup (with hot data in flash and backup data on the spinning disks).

Nimble is eyeing late 2013 or or 2014 for its IPO, Vasudevan said, although it raised its final funding six to nine months before it planned to because outside firms kept approaching it with aggressive and attractive term sheets. In the end, Nimble took money from all of its existing investors as well as newcomer GGV Capital. Vasudevan said the new investment will help fuel international expansion as well as a planned surge in headcount over the next 18 months.